At the beginning of the year, a dear brother and good friend, whom I met in New
York, invited me to his wedding which was going to be in Hong Kong. What better
excuse to go to visit "China" than going for a wedding? This also made the
decision of where to go on vacation this year quite easy to figure out. So we
booked a hotel and the 12 hour flights, with a layover in Zurich, because we
missed it/because it was the cheapest flight.

First impression after we got there: it's hot. Like really, really, really hot.
And humid. Buckets of water …continue.

Because of work, I couldn't take a long, proper vacation right after our
wedding, so we decided that after some deadlines at the beginning of September,
we would do a nice, two week honeymoon. Given that I love flying and I need the
frequent flier miles, while my wife was not so thrilled about the idea of
spending more than 10 hours in a tin coffin whizzing around the air at 900km/h,
we had to find a middle ground. After lots of searching on Pinterest for
honeymoon locations, we decided to go to Mauritius. It's fairly far, it got me
the miles I needed to keep my …continue.

My wife has never been outside of Romania before this year, so I thought I would
use this summer to fix that by traveling around as much as possible.

­­­

Right after our wedding, we went for a short, one week, roadtrip honeymoon
around three capitals: Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava. Bam, three countries
right there.

We stayed only one night in Budapest and we left Romania late, because I had to
update my Romanian bank account (which I hadn't used in the last three years)
and because my wife had to apply for a new ID card.

This is the land of cheap layovers on the way to Romania. Thanks to the
invisible hand of the market, tickets to the airports that are close to where my
fiancee lives were 50% cheaper when flying through Istanbul, with an overnight
layover, than more direct flights. It was still cheaper when buying two nights
in a hotel. So through Istanbul it was. I figured it might be my last trip
alone, so it should be fun.

And it was. Istanbul is a very colorful and diverse city. You see all kinds of
people getting along. And they have something us in the "west" don't have: time.
Everywhere …continue.

This year started off well, with another trip to the USA, on a business trip to
Mountain View. One of the things that I missed last time I was in San Francisco
was Alcatraz. When I arrived there I realized that you need to buy tickets
several weeks in advance, so it was too late by that time. So, this time, after
I bought the plane tickets to San Francisco, I bought my ticket to Alcatraz :)))

One of my favourite movies when I was a kid was "The
Rock", with Sean Connery and Nicholas
Cage, which takes place in Alcatraz. Ever since then I wanted …continue.

In September I went to Belgium to work in a Google datacenter, near Mons, for
two weeks. I took the op­por­tu­ni­ty and used the three weekends to wander around
and visit a lot of places, including three capitals: Brussels, Amsterdam and
Paris (hence the title of the post).

I flew to Amsterdam on Saturday morning. The first thing I wanted to do was to
visit the Google office there, but it was in a commercial space, which is closed
during weekends, so I couldn't get in :(. So, as I was looking around on
Tri­pAd­vi­sor for where to go next, one thing kept drawing …continue.

After a week in New York and another one in hot, humid Richmond, where I had a
very blessed time due to who was there, I finally arrived to the official
des­ti­na­tion of my trip: Mountain View, where Google has more employees then the
number of people who live in my hometown of Marghita.

The trip there consisted of a long and quite stressful day, which started off
with a rush and not getting a chance to say good bye to all my new friends, then
my plane getting delayed, almost missing my connecting flight, scratching my
rental …continue.

The Big Apple. New York. The greatest city in the world, as every tour guide in
the city will tell you every 5 minutes.

I went for a business trip to the USA, to Mountain View, California, but before
that I took two weeks of vacation: one in New York and one in Richmond (before
I get any more questions as to why on Earth would I go there, it was for a
Christian Conference).

I was very curious to see New York for myself. I had heard so many things about
it: some people absolutely love it, others complain about the insane …continue.

Last weekend I went to Geneva, to visit Ciprian, a friend who is doing an
internship at CERN. He also happens to be a frequent reader of my blog :D.

Before joining the darkcomputer science side, I was a wannabe
physicist. I went to lots of physics com­pe­ti­tions (and had some good results)
and I even applied to the physics department at UBB. But in 12th grade I
discovered that pro­gram­ming is also quite fun, and it has a greater payoff, so I
decided to go study that. I don't regret this decision, but I still fondly
remember the things that I learned from my awesome physics …continue.